Screen flickering on Surface Book or Surface Pro 4? Hyper-V may be the culprit

If you are one of the lucky who picked up a new Surface Pro 4 or Surface Book you may be working through some of the pros and cons today. Although many of the pre-release bugs were fixed with a hardware update dated on 10/23 through Windows Update, there are still a few bugs around.

One issue we have seen reported that has an easy fix is intermittent screen flickering on the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book. You can see an example of it in this Tweet from our friend and developer Lance McCarthy. Needless to say, that would be a very frustrating bug as it makes using the Surface rather difficult.

The culprit appears to Hyper-V, which many devs have enabled after installing Visual Studio. Alternatively, users may have manually enabled Hyper-V for running virtual machines (Hyper-V is not on by default, so non-devs would rarely experience this issue). Evidently, there is a bug with the new Intel HD graphics drivers for the new Skylake processors.

You can disable Hyper-V with a simple command line:

Type CMD into search bar

Enter in dism.exe /Online /Disable-Feature:Microsoft-Hyper-V

Obviously, disabling Hyper-V is not a long term solution. The good news is Microsoft is aware of the issue and evidently working on a fix. Indeed, the HD graphics drivers are on the buggy side for the new Surfaces as we have seen the driver crash a few times on our new Surface Book. Other issues that Microsoft is aware of and prioritizing for fixing include an occasional audio pop from the speakers.

We'll keep you posted when Microsoft releases a proper fix. Are you experiencing any other issues with your new Surface? Let us know in comments or dive into our forums: